Print + Digital Reporting

The most ambitious clean energy option — fusion, a lesser-known type of nuclear power that could one day put a near-limitless supply of electricity on the grid — has faced one big problem for years: It's expensive.

The research is expensive. The logistics are expensive. The materials are expensive. But that might be changing, thanks to scientists who are figuring out how to tweak complex magnetic fields.

A recent paper published in Nature Physics chronicles how a team of scientists working at KSTAR in South Korea figured out how to predict and calm down explosive bursts called “edge-localized modes.” Left wild, these modes can get big enough to cause permanent damage to the reactor.

“It was a big surprise to everybody,” first author Jong-Kyu Park, a researcher at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), told The Daily Beast. “When we validated this method with such high accuracy, it was really unprecedented.”

Park said the future of fusion power — which hangs on the highly-anticipated International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) under construction in France — depends on this ability to control these solar flare-like bursts of energy.

A reactor is, after all, essentially an artificial star. Like the sun, it runs on continuous fusion reactions fueled by plasma, a super high-energy, charged gas that can run up to 200 million degrees Celsius. This plasma on earth can erupt in in fast, filament-like bursts of energy, just like solar flares. They're notoriously unstable. That's bad news for any potential buyer of a fusion reactor: damage requires maintenance.

Our final days are difficult because they are infused with uncertainty: We don't know which meal, conversation, embrace or even goodbye will be our last. This is felt perhaps most acutely by those who live with a terminal illness. For these patients, death will come soon — but not right away.

Advance care planning — which often begins with a simple, structured conversation — can help patients make decisions and settle what will be done ahead of time, relieving some of chaos and confusion that accompanies end-of-life care. But knowing when to begin this step can be difficult: Families and even doctors can be so optimistic about a loved one's future that a patient can miss the chance to make wishes clear.

Dr. Stephanie Harman, the clinical chief of palliative care at Stanford Health Care, is leading a pilot program at Stanford Medicine that explores the potential for artificial intelligence (AI) to help doctors guide patients through these decisions. Though the tool isn't designed to predict a specific time of death — it doesn't give a precise number of months or years — the predictive analytics model identifies patients who have a high probability of dying in three to 12 months. One day this type of model might transform clinical care. Death is notoriously difficult to predict — at great costs to the health care system and, of course, anyone with a loved one nearing the end of life.

"[Doctors are] terrible at predicting prognosis," said Harman. "If that information is there [from AI], hopefully that raises the likelihood that the care this patient receives from their health care team matches what they have prioritized. To have care that aligns with what matters most to patients and families — that's the ultimate goal."

We've all heard of the "sugar rush." It's a vision that prompts parents and even teachers to snatch candy away from kids, fearing they'll soon be bouncing off the walls, wired and hyperactive. It’s a myth American culture has clung to for decades—and these days, it’s not just a kid thing. Adults are wary of sugar, too. Some of this fear is warranted—diabetes, the obesity epidemic—but the truth is, sugar doesn't cause hyperactivity. Its impact on the body isn’t an up-and-down thing. The science is clear: There is no "sugar rush.”

To find out how and why the myth started, we need to go back to well before the first World War—then pay a visit to the 1970s.

According to cultural historian Samira Kawash, America has had a long, complex, love-hate relationship with sugar. In Candy: A Century of Panic and Pleasure, Kawash traces the turn from candy-as-treat to candy-as-food in the early 20th century. At that time, the dietary recommendations from scientists included a mix of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, with sugar as essential for energy.

Not everyone was on board: The temperance movement, for example, pushed the idea that sugar caused an intoxication similar to alcohol, making candy-eaters sluggish, loopy, and overstimulated. In 1907, the chief of the Philadelphia Bureau of Health estimated that the "appetite" for candy and alcohol were "one and the same," Kawash writes. On the flip side, other scientists suggested that sugar from candy could stave off cravings for alcohol—a suggestion that candymakers then used in their advertisements.

While the debate about sugar as an energy source raged in America, militaries around the world were also exploring sugar as energy for soldiers.

Vasarhelyi has made six full-length documentaries. [….] PAW featured her Sundance Award-winning film Meru (2015), which was shortlisted for an Oscar.

This immersive documentary follows pro climber Alex Honnold from his cramped “dirtbag” van to the big open sky around and below El Capitan in Yosemite National Park.

Honnold’s journey is anything but straight up: It’s a story of discipline and drive, but it’s also a story of false starts and falls. “Free solo” is how he climbs — no rope, no partner below. Along the way, he meets someone who threatens the whole enterprise, a girl who shows him how to be vulnerable, express emotion, and love.

All six of Vasarhelyi’s films have felt “incredibly personally significant” to her, and each has had a unique political stake. Where her earlier films captured political violence and its aftermath, Free Solo tracks an inner turbulence: Honnold’s struggle for identity, intimacy, vulnerability.

The film asks big questions about how to live with both risk and intention in an uncertain time. “He inspires us to have courage. He inspires us to be better people,” Vasarhelyi says, speaking for herself and Chin. She was moved by Honnold’s patient, focused mindfulness, his trust, his grit, his uniquely stubborn discipline. “And let this inspire you — because it applies to my 5-year-old daughter, and it applies to my mother. The world may be big, the world may be hard, but still, we as individuals who have a vision and drive can make a difference,” she says.

The path forward in quantum computing is unclear, but for big governments and a range of companies, the destination isn’t: quantum advantage, or quantum supremacy, the point at which a quantum computer can outperform a classical computer at a particular task.

Qubits, or quantum bits, are exponentially more powerful than the bits of classical computing. A bit is either “0” or “1.” But a qubit—based on the spin of an electron for instance—can be both states at the same time. One of quantum’s quirks is it effectively allows a system to compute problems with a vast multitude of different outcomes. The problems include everything from encryption-breaking and taxi routing to neuromorphic computing and molecule modeling. Some industries could experience “exponential speedups,” according to a recent commentary in Science.

But it’s early days. Even IBM, a pioneer of quantum information theory, already appears to be weary of the “hype.” Of course, it’s eager to commercialize the technology, too: Like Rigetti and D-Wave, it recently opened up its cloud-based resources to startups worldwide.

But there are still significant hurdles, says Jim Clarke, Intel’s director of quantum hardware. “There are real serious problems, both at the scientific and engineering level, that need to be overcome before we can scale this up.”

Remoteness is what makes family worry about us. It’s true at any age — from a daughter who sets off on a weekend hike into the deep woods to a couple who chooses to age in place in the country with only deer, songbirds and cicadas to keep them company.

But what happens when disaster strikes? According to a recent analysis of over 1.8 million 911 calls, callers in rural areas wait twice as long for an ambulance (on average) than elsewhere. That’s a 13-minute wait in the country vs. a six minute wait in the city or suburbs. Ten percent of folks in rural areas had to wait a full 30 minutes for an ambulance to arrive.

A Mississippi-based team of doctors is working on a telemedicine technology that could get emergency care to rural areas faster. It’s an aerial ambulance: a drone named HiRO, which stands for Health Integrated Rescue Operations. The team is working on how to make the drone simpler and easier to use — easy enough so that people with no medical knowledge can use it, even when they’re in the middle of a crisis situation.

“The inspiration for using drone-based technology [were] individuals [who] could not reach or communicate with their frail, elderly loved ones due to downed power lines and trees,” said Italo Subbarao, an emergency medicine specialist who came up with the idea for HiRO after a severe tornado hit Hattiesburg, Miss. “First responders saw the messages and responded appropriately, but it took time.”

It's a quest—a biological prospecting—that depends on carefully-crafted partnerships with national governments, village communities, and local healers.

"The community has to know what we intend to do. They have to permit us to go in there," Soejarto told The Daily Beast. "When you want to sit down with the [traditional] healer, before you ask any questions, you have to ask permission to the healer whether he or she wishes to be interviewed."

An emeritus professor of the College of Pharmacy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Soejarto recently contributed to a paper with first author Joshua Henkin. It describes two expeditions in Laos during a recent “dry winter season” in Xiengkhouang along with Bolikhamxay, a lowland rain forest recovering from the devastation of past fires and logging. Soejarto's team collected over 200 samples from nearly 100 species in total.

The report found that, based on intel from traditional healers in Laos, six unique plant extracts from six different species “exhibited notable cytotoxicity” against colon cancer.

Five of these plant extracts killed more than half of HT-29 colon cancer cells—a notoriously hard-to-treat cell line (adenocarcinoma).

That's what happened to Stephanie Covington Armstrong, author of Not All Black Girls Know How to Eat. "Everyone assumed all of the stereotypes: Black girls are more comfortable with our bodies. We like being heavier. We don't develop eating disorders," she told The Daily Beast. "So I could hide in plain sight."

Covington Armstrong's memoir follows her struggle with yo-yo dieting, orthorexia (an obsession with healthy food), starving, and bingeing. "It's like an addict sampling drugs: you do just a little here, a little there, and then eventually they're doing you," she said.

At some point during her stay in the memory care wing of a large, long-term facility in Hamilton Township, N.J., Marie Tykarski started to complain of pain. Getting to the bottom of what happened — understanding how and why she got hurt — took time.

“My mother-in-law was in a state of dementia, so we couldn’t get answers from her,” said Rich Allegretti. “She couldn’t explain anything, except that she hurt.

“I don’t think she knew what hurt, but she knew that she was in severe pain,” he added. “She knew something was wrong, but she couldn’t describe it.”

The family eventually learned that Tykarski fractured her femur. Twice. In three weeks. She shattered the same leg at two fracture sites. Surgeons performed what’s called an open reduction internal fixation procedure, inserting plates and screws.

Craig Hubert, a partner at the law firm Szaferman, Lakind, Blumstein & Blader, took on the case. In 2011, the firm filed a civil suit, alleging neglect. The case was later settled out of court.

“This was a mistake, and quite frankly, if there had been a video camera in that room, after the first fracture, the administration, the nurses and all of the caregivers would have learned from the improper transfer procedure,” Hubert said. He asserted that there’s “a substantial likelihood” that a camera would have prevented Tykarski’s second injury.

In his keynote presentation at the 2018 Collaborative Journalism Summit, Grégoire Lemarchand, the deputy editor in chief and head of social networks at Agence France-Presse, spoke about how American journalists might use lessons learned from CrossCheck, a collaborative verification project, in preparation for this year’s midterm elections.

CrossCheck, a collaboration between 37 partners across France and the United Kingdom, focused on covering “false, misleading, and confusing claims that circulated online” in the 10 weeks before the 2017 French presidential election.

“Participants were under a common sense of public service,” Lemarchand said. In the weeks leading up to the election, he said, the French public’s trust in the media was very low — dangerously low. “There was really a global feeling that the threat of this disinformation is so big and serious that we have to work together. If we allow this information to spiral out of control, we will be left crying, as the public will no longer know what is true. If people cannot trust, then democracy can’t work.”

CrossCheck, which was launched by Jenni Sargent, the managing director of First Draft, wasn’t just limited to newsrooms — journalists were joined by teams at universities, nonprofits and tech companies. Google News Lab in Paris and Facebook gave financial and technical support to the project.

After a quick round of wine, cheese and appetizers in the lobby of Montclair State University’s School of Communication and Media building, the Collaborative Journalism Summit officially began with a keynote presentation and discussion about ethnic media.

Gerson began her talk by defining “ethnic media,” a term that, she emphasized, is “imperfect.” Other related terms include minority media, diaspora media or immigrant media, though none of these terms are universally accepted.

Try to recall a conversation without hearing it in your head. It’s difficult, because sound impacts our memory formation. That’s why we forget the milk at the store, and leave without the one thing we came for: we heard the instructions, but we didn’t really listen.

This cognitive capacity to keep sounds in mind for a short period of time was the focus of a paper published in Neuron by a team at McGill University’s Brain Imaging Centre. The studytested the efficacy of a non-invasive brain therapy called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS. Using a hand-held device placed against the scalp, the researchers positioned the targeted, oscillating pulses (at 5 Hz) into the brain in order to stimulate nerve cells. (The pulses are reportedly not painful.)

The group found some surprising results. TMS seemed to directly improve the working memory of 17 participants in a recall task. Participants were asked to recognize a melody when the order of notes played back was reversed. After TMS treatment, they were able to remember the series of sounds quicker, and more accurately.

Imagine sitting next to a bored stranger fidgeting with a pen. The room is silent, except for that pen. Quiet amplifies—it makes everything sound louder. Yet for people who suffer from misophonia, every tap of that pen is louder than a chisel removing tile. The man on the train breathes with more force than a motorcycle. And that co-worker chews gum as if she were a cow in front of a microphone.

Misophonia—an emotional, decreased tolerance to sound—can make some situations feel uncomfortable, or even unbearable: anger, disgust, anxiety, avoidance. But the first trial for the condition, published recently in the Journal of Affective Disorders,claims to have found an effective treatment: cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

“Despite the high burden of this condition, to date there is no evidence-based treatment available,” first author Arjan Schröder wrote in the abstract. Schröder and a team of Dutch researchers treated 90 patients with CBT for eight group sessions, every other week, and found that CBT was effective for half of the patients. What’s more, patients who had more severe symptoms were more likely to respond to treatment.

If you say that you’re allergic to penicillin—a narrow-spectrum antibiotic that, for many bacterial infections, is still considered to be a “wonder drug”—your doctor won’t prescribe it. Once you write it on those forms in the waiting room, or tell your pharmacist, “penicillin allergy” becomes part of your permanent medical record.

Yet a growing body of evidence suggests that most people who say they’re allergic to penicillin are, well, wrong. In a recent study published in Journal of Allergy & Clinical Immunology, nearly 90 percent of patients who had “penicillin allergy” listed on their medical charts were found to actually have no such allergy at all.

“There’s this problem—what you could consider an epidemic—of people labeled with unverified penicillin allergy. It’s the number one drug allergy that’s listed in patients’ records,” Dr. Dave Khan, a professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and co-author of the study, told The Daily Beast. Over 1 in 10—up to 15 percent—of Americans has a reported penicillin allergy. That’s more than the number of adults in the U.S. who have hay fever (7.8 percent), and the number of children under age three who have food allergies (8.0 percent).

Shortly after five o’clock on a Sunday evening in February 2013, a severe EF4 tornado ripped through Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Winds whirling up to 170 mph tore through town, warping what seemed solid and upending the community. A church’s steeple was ripped off, along with roof after roof on main street. A vehicle parked near the baseball stadium was taken up by the twister and spit out near the pitching mound in the middle of the field, according to the storm report.

As soon as he saw the wreckage on TV—homes reduced to rubble, power lines snapped, mangled trees and traffic lights—Dr. Italo Subbarao panicked.

“I remember thinking, 'I can see my grandma’s house,'” he recalled. “'But an ambulance can’t get out there!'”

That his grandmother was remote and isolated from emergency help ignited worry within Subbarao, an osteopathic physician specializing in emergency care.

So he began tinkering with a solution: an aerial ambulance that could fly above the chaos on the ground, with live-saving medical supplies in tow.

Yi Wang believes in building from the ground up — and across great distances.

A computer scientist turned education app entrepreneur, Wang is, at heart, a connector: he learns the inside of a network, and makes it stronger. As a graduate student in computer science at Princeton, he found solutions to route information faster and more efficiently through the Internet. As a product manager at Google, he worked to improve the infrastructure of ‘the cloud.’ And he holds a patent for virtual router migration.

Wang’s new venture, an artificial intelligence-based English language learning app called Liulishuo, is built on this principle of connection. Available in the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store, Liulishuo has over 50 million registered users, making it one of the most popular language learning apps in China.

“We have built the world’s largest speech corpus of Chinese people speaking English,” said Wang, who earned his Ph.D. in computer science at Princeton in 2009, during a recent visit to Princeton from Shanghai, where he’s now based. “On top of this valuable data set, we were able to build the world’s most advanced speech assessment engine for English language learners.”

Hundreds of candles were lit as more than 100 colleagues, family, and friends gathered in East Pyne courtyard Sept. 15 for a vigil to support a Princeton graduate student imprisoned in Iran.

Xiyue Wang, a fifth-year graduate student in history, is serving a 10-year prison term after his conviction on two counts of espionage. He was arrested by Iranian authorities in the summer of 2016 as he was completing archival research in Tehran for his dissertation on Eurasian history and has been in custody since then. The University has said that the charges against Wang are “completely false.”

Wang’s wife, Hua Qu, told of how she has dealt with the circumstances, day by day. “During the ups and downs of the past year, my hopes for Xi’s release have been shattered time and time again. Every time I think about him, I have stopped imagining how he spends his days, and how long the next 10 years may mean to my family,” she said. “My husband’s health is deteriorating fast.”

Wang, 36, is a naturalized American citizen who was born in Beijing. Qu, an attorney who works in Manhattan, and their 4-year-old son are Chinese citizens.

Turbulence jostles a rough flight, mixes rivulets in a stream, billows smoke into mysterious swirls. Though ubiquitous in nature and technology, these chaotic movements of fluids have defied thorough scientific description for centuries.

The late Sin-I Cheng, a long-time professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, studied turbulence with a patient passion. As a researcher who specialized in fluid dynamics, Cheng was fueled by this phenomenon of disruption. He brought clarity and rigor to the irregular and chaotic, always working and re-working toward a deeper understanding.

His first focus was instability of flight. As the United States entered the space race in the 1950s, Cheng pioneered the math that gave engineers the assurance that the burning of fuel would propel – not explode – a rocket. But his lifelong quest was much broader: to find an analytical theory of turbulence, to understand and predict it.

“Everything in life is some form of chaos presenting itself to us,” said Irene T. Cheng, one of Cheng’s four children. “In his quiet way, he always believed in that, and he would look at all facets of life through that lens, seeking order where there was none apparent.”

Cheng recently made a gift to name a professorship in engineering in honor of her father, who was a faculty member at Princeton for over four decades. He died of cancer in 2011, at the age of 89.

Pizza has a proud history of fueling late-night lab work, and scientists in Naples—an Italian city famous for its slice—have easy access to some of the world's tastiest take-out. But what inspires engineer Bruno Siciliano is not just that first bite so much as how the dish is made.

“Preparing a pizza involves an extraordinary level of agility and dexterity,” says Siciliano, who directs a robotics research group at the University of Naples Federico II. Stretching a deformable object like a lump of dough requires a precise and gentle touch. It is one of the few things humans can handle, but robots cannot—yet.

Siciliano's team has been developing a robot nimble enough to whip up a pizza pie, from kneading dough to stretching it out, adding ingredients and sliding it into the oven. RoDyMan (short for Robotic Dynamic Manipulation) is a five-year project supported by a €2.5-million grant from the European Research Council.

Being a woman in science isn’t easy. In most situations, you have to deal with everything that comes with being the only woman in the room. In Hidden Figures, a new film based on the true story of NASA’s female “computers”, Taraji P. Henson depicts this perfectly as legendary mathematician Katherine G. Johnson, who was awarded the Medal of Freedom in 2016 for her contributions to the space program.

Katherine G. Johnson’s calculations got us to the moon — but for many women studying and working in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), race and gender can be a strong tether. Everyone brings their own assumptions to work. What’s difficult on the daily can be a range of unequal treatment, access, and bias, from micro-aggressions to sexual harassment.

Amazon plans to hire 100,000 workers in the next year and a half, with 2,500 of them in New Jersey.

While they are not minimum-wage jobs, the pace of work can be very demanding.

As a business, shipping is like real estate: Location is everything. That's why Amazon has eight fulfillment centers in Pennsylvania, seven in New Jersey, and two in Delaware to deliver to your door as quickly as possible. But John Carr, a spokesman for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, said the "free" shipping from Amazon comes at a cost.

"Their performance standards are very, very high. When you meet one, they tend to ... raise that speed and standard of how many orders you can pick and pull and pack in a certain amount of time. And Amazon tracks that," Carr said. "I think a lot of these workers get hurt because of the pace that they have to maintain to meet the goals set by Amazon."

Machinists were behind at least one failed drive to unionize the warehouses. Company spokeswoman Lauren Lynch said Amazon gives warehouse workers the exact same benefits as other employees, including health insurance, retirement plans, paid parental leave, and company stock.

The stone monuments of Italy's Certosa di Bologna cemetery have stood for more than two centuries as symbols of peace and eternity. But even stone does not last forever. So Enrico Sassoni, a visiting postdoctoral research associate in Princeton's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is working to protect the marble monuments and even make them stronger.

"In spite of being apparently very durable, marble is actually sensitive to several deterioration processes," Sassoni said. "Environmental temperature variations cause the opening of cracks inside marble, and rain causes dissolution of the carved surface."

With the help of an international team, the Princeton researchers have developed a low-cost and nontoxic treatment that might someday help art preservation and conservation specialists.

How? By applying a thin film of a calcium compound commonly found in bones and teeth. This calcium compound, called hydroxyapatite, is formed by the reaction of a water-based phosphate salt solution and calcite, the mineral that makes up marble. The solution seeps into and binds cracks in the marble's surface.

Nancy Rappaport ’82 has devoted her entire career to medicine. A child psychiatrist and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, she’s worked in the Cambridge, Mass., public school system for over two decades. Rappaport says her specialty is “angry teenagers” — and something about her hearty laugh says she doesn’t usually have trouble keeping up.

In August 2015, she was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer. With three children of her own — one currently in med school — the longtime runner (13 Boston Marathons and counting) says she was stopped in her tracks.

“That transition — going from a doctor to a patient — has really opened me up,” she says. “For me, it was early-stage breast cancer. For other people, it could be a mild heart attack, or a major depression. Those things are relatively common for doctors to manage, but still, it can feel like earth-shattering news.”

Izzy Kasdin ’14 is a proud local. She knows the rhythms of the town and University: how the campus fills and empties each year, marked by a calendar of beginnings, breaks, Reunions, and departures. She grew up in Princeton.

At 14, Kasdin began volunteering as a docent with the Princeton Historical Society, a non-profit committed to sharing its own sense of the “local.” In January, the organization named Kasdin as its new executive director.

“It was a complete shock,” Kasdin remembers. She says although she didn’t formally apply to the position, her return to Princeton “makes perfect sense.”

It was the Historical Society, after all, that first introduced her to the field of museum curation and preservation. As a teen, her first task was to greet visitors at the door. Then, in 2008, the Historical Society organized an exhibition about political participation and activism. At the closing of the exhibit, Kasdin remembers taking the time to carefully pack up a women’s suffrage banner.

For Martinez, it’s not just a walk through Seattle. It’s a step away from his “white-collar job” at Microsoft, and a step towards the microphone on the intense-yet-intimate stage at Jai Thai on Broadway, home of the Rain City Poetry Slam.

Though he considers himself to be a “real newcomer and rookie,” Martinez is the current Grand Champion of the Rain City Poetry Slam. He earned that title by winning the Rain City slam’s finals in April, which attracted 250 people.

“Spoken word is a unique art form because it combines storytelling, traditional verse, and wordplay,” Martinez says. “Your energy has to match the room’s, and then take it up a notch. If you deliver, and the room gives you back the love you put into the poem, that’s the greatest feeling an artist can have.”

Glenn H. Shepard Jr. ’87 has a lush and noisy backyard: Toucans squawk, parrots chatter, monkeys howl. He lives in the middle of the jungle. Settled in Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon, Shepard works as a full-time researcher and ethnology curator at the Goeldi Museum in Belém do Pará, Brazil.

Some might say Shepard lives in paradise. Yet as an ethnobotanist — a researcher interested in how cultures use plants, especially as medicine — Shepard’s work focuses on illness, pain, and stress. Every culture, he says, has found ways to heal.

Shepard is a medical anthropologist who has dedicated himself to the Matsigenka, an indigenous people who live in Manú National Park, an isolated natural wonder deep within the Peruvian rain forest. This June, Shepard’s work was featured in National Geographic: “This Park in Peru Is Nature ‘in Its Full Glory’—With Hunters,” by Emma Harris.

The Princeton Hidden Minority Council presented green graduation cords to 33 seniors during a ceremony May 15 for first-generation and low-income students. About 55 people attended the event in the Carl A. Fields Center. Speakers included council co-founders Brittney Watkins ’16 and Dallas Nan ’16 and management consultant Jeremy White ’96, who gave the keynote address.

About 600 people attended the Pan-African Graduation May 29 in Richardson Auditorium. Tennille Haynes, director of the Fields Center, said the event recognized students’ “hardships and their struggles. With sit-ins and protests, our students have been creative in finding ways to be heard.” Seniors Aisha Oxley and Kujegi Camara performed a spoken-word poem about learning to stand up for their identities as students of color.

The final scene of Stephanie Leotsakos ’16’s chamber opera, OMG, opens with a World War II veteran clasping an amulet to his heart, weeping about the memory of his mother, Anna. His daughter, Anna Francesca, walks into the room, distracted by her cellphone. Her Snapchats and emojis are projected onto the screen behind the stage; for a moment, the only music is the sound of screen swipes and texting. Then Anna looks up — and she sees her father crying. “OMG,” she sings, and drops her phone.

OMG, Leotsakos’ senior-thesis opera, premiered April 23 in Taplin Auditorium. The 51-minute production featured eight singers and 10 musicians. The story opens in A.D. 550 near the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy; over six scenes, it moves toward the present day.

“OMG is by far the most complex thing I have ever created,” said Leotsakos, who learned the violin at 3, the piano at 4, and the viola at 9. She started composing two years ago.

Michael Lemonick has marked many seasons in Princeton. He was born and raised here. He’s watched the winter turn to spring year after year. And when he talks about the weather, it’s not small talk.

For three decades, Lemonick has been one of the nation’s eminent science writers, notably for Time Magazine, for which he wrote more than 50 cover stories. In November, he became the opinion editor at Scientific American. And in between, he spent seven years as the senior science writer at Climate Central, the Palmer Square-based nonprofit, nonpartisan research and media organization that employs climate scientists, researchers, fellows, and journalists.

Lemonick knows it’s been a warmer winter. But, he says, that doesn’t mean we should assume this year’s milder temperatures are due to climate change — especially since last year’s winter was quite cold.

“The fact that it’s warmer this year than last year? No. That has nothing to do with climate change,” he says. “The fact that, on average, it’s warmer in every state in the winter than it was in 1900, and that it’s been steadily rising? Yes, that has everything to do with climate change.”

On Dec. 7, in front of a full-house audience of star-struck undergraduates and artsy locals, David Zabel ’88 spoke from a stage that supported the early days of his career — literally. It was at 185 Nassau, the longtime home of the arts at Princeton, that he spent hours and hours at late-night rehearsals and intensive writing workshops.

Once he discovered the theater at Princeton, Zabel said, his other interests (history, for example) quietly faded away. It snapped his future into focus.

“I was interested in a bunch of different things,” he said. “It was just theater that embraced me — earliest and most fully.”

Zabel is now an award-winning television writer, producer, and director. He wrote more than 45 episodes of ER, the medical series on NBC. He was the showrunner of ER for the program’s final five years, and he was also the showrunner and executive producer of Detroit 1-8-7 and Betrayal (both on ABC).

Outside Daniel Velasco ’13’s classroom window at the 21st Century Charter School in Gary, Ind., stands an abandoned building with boarded up windows. But the view doesn’t bother Velasco — his focus is on his students, not his surroundings.

“I absolutely love all of my students, even those that make me want to pull my hair out,” Velasco said with a chuckle. “The greatest lesson I have learned from them is patience.”

This is Velasco’s third year at the charter school. During his first two, he taught full time as a Teach for America fellow. Velasco taught AP United States history, AP world history, economics, government, and world history. He has also tried to build relationships with his students, and to connect with them as a mentor.

“When I teach my kids, stay after school with them, and host tutoring sessions during breaks, I think about the teachers that did that for me,” he said.

On a windy night in September, Tracy K. Smith — cloaked in an elegant gray frock that was wrapped in a mysteriously tidy way, as if by magic — was the picture of a professor. A sea of eager undergraduates set their phones to “silent” and tucked their pea coats, book bags and pumpkin spice lattes under their seats. Alone in the front row, Smith sat quietly, listened intently. And then, as if lit by a lamp from within, she warmed up, smiled and walked to the podium.

Smith, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, memoirist, and professor of creative writing at Princeton University, had been invited to be the keynote speaker for the Princeton University Women’s Mentorship Program’s annual kick-off event. Under the gothic chandeliers of Mathey College’s Common Room, Smith unfolded her notes and began.

“In my first years as a teacher,” Smith said from the podium, “I wanted to feel solidarity with my students. So, I completed the assignments I gave them. I wrote what they wrote.”

In September, John Oakes ’83, a veteran book publisher based in New York, returned to the Princeton campus for “Careers Beyond Wall Street,” a panel sponsored by Princeton Progressives. He described a shrinking industry that is, well, still stuck in the Stone Age.

“I think going into book publishing — certainly the traditional side of it — is tantamount to apprenticing yourself to a potter. Or a stone carver,” he said.

Book publishing is “quaint, time-consuming, frustrating, and occasionally thrilling,” he said — and it’s in the midst of a massive transformation.

As the co-publisher at OR Books, an independent press that sells e-books and paperback books direct to readers, and prints on demand, Oakes is shaping that transformation, one book at a time. In the coming year, Oakes also plans to re-launch The Evergreen Review, a groundbreaking literary magazine, with Editor-in-Chief Dale Peck.

Meru, a Sundance Audience Award-winning white-knuckler of a documentary, follows three elite mountain climbers on their quest to conquer the 21,000-foot summit of Mount Meru, the most technically difficult peak in the Himalayas. It’s a death-defying expedition into sub-zero temperatures that involves extraordinary risks.

But the mission that climbers Conrad Anker, Renan Ozturk, and Jimmy Chin share is not only physically grueling; it’s emotional. Meru tests their friendship, and their relationships with their families back home.

No one knows this better than Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi ’00, who co-directed and co-produced the film with Chin. The directors fell in love through the making of Meru, and they married in 2013. Now, they split their time between the Upper East Side of New York City and the big blue skies of Jackson Hole, Wyo.

Allegra “Lovejoy” Wiprud ’14 gets emotional when she recalls her first land stewardship trip at the D&R Greenway Land Trust, an 18,000-acre land preservation and conservation nonprofit. It was an invasive species removal job in Hopewell, N.J. That day, the dangerous plant that her team tracked down, cut back, and destroyed — the climbing growth that covered, choked, and threatened to kill a tree — was English ivy (Hedera helix).

Perched on a picnic table outside the Johnson Education Center, a historic barn overlooking Greenway Meadows, Wiprud mimes how she removed the ivy, grabbing the vine with her hands as if it were a snake coiled around her neck. By clearing the ivy away, she says, “We can give the tree its life back.”

Ivy might look quintessentially Princeton, but as Wiprud is learning, the non-native plant climbs and grows so fast that it smothers other plants and starves trees of sunlight.

Patrick Ryan ’68 doesn’t do “art speak.” But he does know how to command the stage at an auction, rattling off antiques and art at break-neck speed to the highest bidder. Last Saturday, at the historic Benjamin Temple house and dairy farm in Ewing, N.J., where he was born and raised, Ryan auctioned off more than 80 items in 2 1/2 hours under a blazing hot sun — all for charity, to support the Ewing Township Historic Preservation Society.

Ryan has led a life of talking fast and moving faster. A long-time art collector and gallery owner, Ryan is just as comfortable in overalls and work boots as in seersucker shorts and a polo shirt.

He reckons he somehow “inherited the Irish gypsy gene,” a drive that rattled against the quiet rituals of his father’s 166-acre dairy farm: rising at 4:30 a.m. to milk 50 cows, twice per day. “The cows don’t care if it’s Christmas,” he remembers.

Gavin Black ’79 has devoted his entire adult life to studying, performing, teaching, and recording 17th- and 18th-century keyboard music. But he knows that studying Baroque music on antique instruments isn’t an easy sell.

“The harpsichord is not remotely as popular as the piano,” he laughs from a bench at the Princeton Early Keyboard Center, the non-profit music studio he founded in 2001. It offers harpsichord, clavichord, and organ lessons for students, composers, and group classes.

Black discovered the organ and harpsichord at age 14, after a stint taking piano lessons left him curious about Baroque music.

As a freshman at Princeton, he would practice the organ alone in the vast and empty University Chapel, lit only by moonlight, courtesy of a special access key.

Megan Connor is a budding film buff. She's headed to the New York Film Academy this fall, and she's also a member of the nonprofit Princeton Garden Theatre on Nassau Street. She believes in movies. Even older ones. But she’s not convinced that the classics have any bite left — even Jaws.

“Jaws isn’t going to be scarier on the big screen — it’s like 40 years old!” Connor, 18, rolled her eyes with a playful smirk in the lobby of the Garden Theatre on June 25. As a Millennial, Connor was raised on easy, 24/7 access to small screen entertainment. At the Garden Theatre, she's learning to love old movies — but with a filter of ironic nostalgia, because "classic" is cool, and "vintage" is hip.

“It’s a popular venue. You just gotta sing clearly for the grandmas in the back.”

In the balcony of the Nederlander Theater on 208 W. 41st St. in New York City, after a Saturday preview matinée, Michael Dean Morgan talks easily over the clatter of mic checks, an active orchestra pit, and a tour below. Even the noise of a yodeling voice warming up backstage doesn’t faze him.

Student Reporting (Princeton University)

Amelia Earhart knew that "adventure" is a verb, and that adventuring is itself enough.

As I left Princeton, I steadied myself for my journey: I planned to enroll in an intermediate-level German course at the Freie Universität Berlin, and then use my language skills to facilitate my work as a genealogist’s research assistant, where I translate and transcribe the family histories of German and Polish Jews. Besides awaking 45 minutes late, dousing myself in hot steam (due to an improperly set espresso machine), losing my way and asking for directions (twice), and ripping my new white dress, my first day at my summer course was a success. The afternoon's placement exam set me at one level above my initial plan, and the following four weeks turned into a rigorous schedule of daily homework assignments, weekly writing assignments, two essays, two oral presentations, a large group project, and two exams. The experience was incredibly immersive, as I worked hard to make every word from my mouth be a German one. The course was a challenge, and I knew that it was exactly where I needed to be.

It was not only the six hours in the classroom every weekday that transformed my German. Thanks to the torrent of chatter in the U-Bahn (Berlin's subway), the talkative passerby in smart footwear and leather bags, and the Wurst and Döner vendors shouting on the street, I learned the language through experience, through osmosis. In a city as busy as Berlin, I learned to speak quickly, and firmly, and loudly — through living there, my fluency became stronger, and more confident.

"The first problem is failure to see the people," David K. Shipler announces early in his book The Working Poor: Invisible in America (published by Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).

In a move unusual for liberal tomes of its ilk, it actually proposes solutions to the problem of poverty. Shipler fearlessly calls for us to look at what the "working poor" are, give some thought to it, and choose a term that's more appropriate. On his title, Shipler claims: "Working poor should be an oxymoron. Nobody who works hard should be poor in America."

Shipler's message bends backward even before it gets to us: indeed, it is the way it travels that makes our impression hazy. I purchased his packet of pages sold at the Princeton University bookstore for around $13, half a week's worth of lunches at McDonald's. This budget is contingent upon the assumption that "the [working] poor" are frugal and use the Dollar Menu, a move that Shipler wouldn't necessarily make himself. "They don't have milk, but they do have cable," sighs Brenda St. Lawrence, a caseworker featured a few times in Shipler's text. Evidently the poor don't follow Malthusian Theory: instead of scaling up the pyramid, they take the elevator a few floors and complain about their aching legs - or their backs, as Willie, the construction worker husband of Sarah, legitimately discovered. Misplaced priorities plague the young couple: they own a stack of CDs but no clothes for the baby. "We'd put ourselves poor," Willie echoed, "but I know if we were smart people, we could be really well off…I guess it's easier to make life easier by doing something that costs money…It's our own fault. I'm not blaming it on anyone else."

As I flip out a pair of jeans from the dryer, a soggy piece of plastic falls to the floor. The letter "Z" was barely visible in a twisted scrawl and what used to be two "O"s now crumpled into a shape similar to the squared-off rims of a hipster's glasses. This is, or rather was, my membership card to my hometown zoo. Warped and jaded, the card hasn't survived a spin cycle, and replacing it won't be easy.

A quick Google search, and I'm on my way: Catskill Game Farm. "Finally, something that will remind me of home," I thought. In addition to the average farm fare of goats and sheep, though, "exotic" animals are also featured: crocodiles, snakes, zebras, giraffes. "2000 animals in 150 different species," a blurb boasts. But an Aug. 4 article warns that the zoo will soon close.

As an undergraduate, Sally Frank '80 took politics to the street, campaigning door-to-door for Democratic candidates. Her political work also extended to a different sort of Street.

During her sophomore and junior years, Frank translated her personal Bicker experiences to a legal suit citing sex-based discrimination against three of Princeton's eating clubs: Ivy Club, Tiger Inn and University Cottage Club. T.I. was the last to concede, and did so in 1992 only after the U.S. Supreme Court twice refused to hear the case. Cottage and Ivy allowed women to join in 1986 and 1990, respectively.

Frank was also active in more traditional politics. She worked for the College Democrats in the presidential election of '76, supporting Jimmy Carter's campaign. She remembers "going to the Jerry Ford rally and heckling," and even met one of Carter's sons.

We all remember the butterfly ballots, the hanging chads. The "2000 election debacle," as J. Alex Halderman GS calls it, filled the headlines with controversy.

But for this Ph.D. candidate in the computer science department, working with fellow graduate student Ariel Feldman under computer science professor Ed Felten, it inspired a study that might just change the direction of midterm elections this year. The results of this study caused an uproar when they were released in September, and these two students show no signs of slowing down.

"We were motivated by the belief that computer systems that play such an important role in our democracy should be subjected to independent, expert security analysis," Feldman said.

Most of the time, the word "race" is the precursor to an awkward pause. It takes a rare student like Lester Mackey '07 to get beyond that discomfort and delve into the meat of the issue.

As a senior staff member of The Prism, the only magazine on campus focusing on "diversity," Mackey finds himself with a unique forum. Over his three years at Princeton, though, he has come to realize that it's no easy task.

With the tag "Dialogue. Diversity. Difference...," The Prism is re-surging this fall in large part due to Mackey's brainstorming sessions with editor Aita Amaize '07 this past summer.

Mackey, who is black, said he thought about race "not much at all" during his adolescence. Yet, at his public high school in Long Island, Mackey said "segregation by geography" based on "patches of black, Hispanic, and white communities" created a "very interesting mix, both racially and economically."